Crowdsourcing: How social media and the wisdom of the crowd change future companies

Abstract

Rather than constituting only a new method in the context of innovation that can help foster a business, crowdsourcing represents a new way of structuring and organizing work by relying on the principles of evolution, swarm intelligence and analog knowledge, self-selection, and task distribution and aggregation. More and more companies try to leverage the distributed intelligence of their customers, suppliers, employees, and internet users by setting up crowdsourcing platforms and broadcasting their problems and tasks to the internal and external crowd. Although crowdsourcing has become quite popular, it also faces some difficulties that must be overcome in order to provide value. The lack of a clear task description and problem explanation, of an appealing platform design, solid terms and constrains of participation, or of a fair price structure may create difficulties for companies applying crowdsourcing. But, once they have gained the relevant knowledge, companies can truly benefit from crowdsourcing and develop superior innovations.